There is a great case to be made about how Robbie's choice is a perfect "it's what my character would do" example. It's such a memed-on saying and we need to be reminded of great examples. I don't think Robbie knew it would end in anything short of certain death but he did it anyway

I think when a tpk occurs is important. TPKing on the final boss fight is perfectly fine. TPKing to an encounter that the dm failed to balance properly is… not fun.

20:40 The rule I use for my table is if there's a tpk, and the players want to continue the story, they can roll new characters to continue in the world, though it'll be some weeks after the parties tpk time wise, and they'll do it from the perspective of another group of adventurers.

In my philosophy, avoid the campaign ending TPK, but have plans for a Total Party Defeat (TPD, a play on TBD or To Be Decided). If you’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3, there is a goblin priestess who the Tieflings and Halsin will task you to defeat. But there is a way to avoid killing her yourself and complete the quest, and that’s by letting her beat you. The priestess lets you live as her prisoner, and an NPC rescues you. Things like that can allow a campaign to continue without losing the narrative or the characters. Have a fate worse than death planned by the villains, have a deity intervene, have an NPC intervene, et cetera. In my Zelda campaign, the party skipped my easy mode area to go straight to mid-hard area. I decided to have an NPC attached to a player’s backstory tail them. If it looked like a TPK would happen, she would intervene and warn her ally that what they’re doing is too hard, and she risked exposing herself and their connection over the party’s recklessness. Basically, “turn back you nincompoops! I can’t rescue you a second time.”

I love how emotional you get with these videos. It’s always enjoyable for a content creators are so passionate about their work

"Everything ends, and it's always sad. But everything begins again too, and that's always happy." The Doctor.

In my first ever game of DND, we hit a TPK. I learned to take risks very seriously. I started a new group recently, and we were playing through a siege, where some of the party were running two separate armies to orotect the kingdom, and the rest of us were in the mele, and ww almost had a TPK, but my character sacrificed himself to kill the enemy leader and force a retreat. That was a rough one

I've had many games that ended in a "TPK's", but no one died! Most were ended because of the greatest enemy ever, Scheduling! I also had one end because of a DM's death! I was in a TPK for our all Orc campaign, after an attack on the elf king failed and bad initiative rolls! Our DM ended up having us captured and sold to drow for running parts of the Out of the Abyss campaign!

If a group has never experienced a TPK, they might think its hard on the players...all of the work and emotion they've put into their character, but its really hard on the DM. We spend hours a day prepping for each session, sometimes 10-14 hours a week for a 2-4 hour session. Days and weeks of hard work over months or years, and to watch all of the world that's been built slip away because of poor choices or fate of dice. It all just sucks, but it happens. If it happens, it happens and that's how the game is played.

As usual, you find such wonderful meaning in role playing, turning our hobby into something beautiful.

There is a movie that shows how you can plan a TPK ending and have it be satisfying: Rogue One.

In addition to all of the reasons stated beautifully in the video ... a TPK may be irritating and unsatisfying in the moment, but it will inevitably lead to a really fun story down the road. As the old saying goes, 'tragedy plus time equals comedy' and that's especially true when the tragedy in question is fictional.

"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." TPKs are the natural consequence for parties that push the limits too often. The threat of everyone dying needs to exist to reign players in and ensure they treat the game world & fiction with the proper weight and respect. Also, the threat of TPKs ensure that players will be willing to retreat & regroup from hard fights.

This reminds me of the campaing before my current one, it was not a TPK but two charcters that where the heat and the soul of the group died, SO everyone agreed that this would cause all of the characters to give up and abandon the mission

I live stream my game and was convinced my party were heading for a TPK, it was a fight they could not win, I let them try. They realised it was bad and retreated, barely escaped and had multiple down pcs. It was awesome fun and so tense. It was a bbeg so I was ready for a new party to pick up.

I’ve DM’d for awhile and I’ve only TPK’d once, however it was planned. I had planned on them going into a fight they couldn’t win, they lost, however a couple very powerful ally’s were there to resurrect all of them. Any other DM’s out there could use this idea for a narrative use for a TPK, but like he said in the video do your best to make it narratively appealing and not cheap feeling.

Was just minding my business, going about my work day, wanting to listen to DnD content, when the last 5-10 min of the video hit. Recently lost my father, and your words were something I definitely needed to hear. Wonderfully said! TAKE MY SUB! lol

Fun fact: the concept and term "Happily Ever After" is actually a construct of the 20th Century.

I mean, how else are you going to isekai your party?

I could never tpk my group. I'm too invested in their characters

There is a part of this that I feel highlights differences in why different people play tabletop games (and probably one of the differences most born out of playing games vs watching them. Not to say one side is all the people who play TTRPGs and the other is all people who watch live plays like it's two non-overlapping groups, just I see how the two paths could give to one side more than the other). Like I think a good story is nice in a tabletop game but I'm here for the mechanics, if my character dies it's frustrating but part of playing a game and means next character if it's just me or next scenario/coming up with why new heroes rose up if it's a tpk. The idea of it being unsatisfying narratively doesn't even occur to me because if I wanted a consistent nice narrative I'd go back to online RP'ing with friends instead of tabletop GAMING. But I do have to acknowledge that some people are more into the ROLE PLAY part of ttrpgs (wonder how many people out there are weirdly into the TT part instead of the RP or G part) especially if they're mainly just watching a like twenty episode series that suddenly clashes.

My regular table disbanded because of scheduling issues, so I've basically been LFGing for the past year and I've never seen so many TPKs and NONE of them have had a good or compelling story reason behind it. It's always happened within the first 3 levels, usually because multiple people in the party utterly lack common sense and do incredibly stupid things, being dropped in the first round of combat or two, leaving the rest of us to scramble against overwhelming odds. Stuff like wandering into the blatantly obvious ambush where the road dips into a ravine and there's an obstruction on the other side. Or the monk going first, charging directly into a group of enemies and then ending up shocked that the group of enemies who get to go before the entire rest of the party turns and murders him. Or charging into the room with 12 enemies in it where everyone can surround and murder the people charging in rather than holding the doorway so we can funnel them like we discussed. I don't expect the average player to be Napoleon on the battlefield, but damn can we use a little common sense here? So yeah, I don't feel anything but frustration about it and it's gotten to the point that I made a grizzled veteran character who will interrupt people in character when they're about to do something stupid. Some people appreciate it, some don't. I don't care anymore because it's actually gotten a party past level 5 with no deaths.

The Pathfinder 2e game I'm in had a TPK in session 2. We learned some valuable lessons on how tactical you need to be to survive in PF2. Also, one player couldn't make it that night, so we had left him in an earlier room in the dungeon ("to guard the exit path"). That meant we could just continue the campaign with the surviving character heading back to town to recruit a new group to avenge his fallen comrades.

(Spoiler warning: EXU Calamity. But it's a pretty obvious spoiler, given the title of the series.) You touched briefly on the concept of planned TPKs, and I'm curious how you think some of these concepts play into (what I think is) an excellent example of one in liveplay: EXU Calamity. Or do you not count it as a TPK, given the result of that final die roll?

I really miss when your videos weren't focused on Critical Role. I don't watch CR, so it feels like there won't be a point in me watching them. This was wonderful, and I'd love to see more like it. First of your videos I've been drawn in quite some time. And thank you for being vulnerable on camera. It's nice to see a man strong enough to be weak in front of others

I think the tension of a possible tpk is appreciated but the actual reality of one can be dissatisfying, especially if one feels like their character didn’t “have a good death.” The death, the end, has to feel like it makes sense for the character they are playing, even if it means the end of that particular campaign. That’s just my thoughts on it.

Between this and BDG’s breakfast sandwich video this week, Im a big fan of the camera operator commentary. ☺️ As long as they are also mic’d up and the audio is salvageable, takes like these are very cute.

IMO this is an indicator of how broken the way we think of TTRPGs is. "Table-top RPG" is a medium in the same way that "board game" is a medium. Despite that, different people have ideas about what they're "supposed to be" specifically, and go into every game operating on that assumption. When other players have some other assumption they all eye each other like they're gonna start grabbing throats. D&D is a game where everyone has hit points, and when someone loses all of their hit points and isn't saved somehow, they die. Them's the rules. That's literally it. That's why half of the rulebook is dedicated to what happens in a fight, because it's something which is supposed to challenge people and make them figure out how to win the scenario they're in. The idea that people are getting _deeply disappointed_ about something so fundamental to the game is... bizarre. The fact that people choose to get so invested and put so much thought in a character that could be wiped from the earth at any moment is a them problem. What y'all are looking for is an *entirely different* sort of TTRPG. It actually shocks me that so few people have gone ahead and made a game where death is _explicitly_ off of the table unless someone decides they _want_ to die. I think people need to prop up games like Tales From The Loop and Hearts and Souls, explicitly narrative games where the goal is to just tell a good story rather than sticking to D&D's "conquer the dungeon" roots in any way whatsoever. Or games like FATE where getting "knocked out of a scene" is a thing, but what that actually means is explicitly up to the GM (or you, if you're the one that knocked someone out.)

Was that song by the guy from mann shorts?

You may never see this but i recently stumbled across your content, and i think you would like the viva la dirt league dnd campain, its a great story and the gameplay is hilarious

Damn. The end of this one really got me

if a TPK makes sense, I am fine with it. If the players rush into a situation that they can't win, don't let them win. However, talk to your player.

At my tables I have two envelopes in the case of a TPK, a red one and a black one. The red one is titled blood, and should the players choose it, they remain alive, or return to life in some campaign fitting way but with some major drawbacks. The black envelope is titled death, and should the players choose it, they die and get picked up by a psychopomp or reaper of souls or something related.

dnd and TTRPGs are games and games need stakes, a fail state, and an in-opportune TPK is the ultimate realization of these stakes, if a TPK is off the table then the stakes are gone and you're no longer playing a game you're playing make believe with your friends around a table

Playing tomb of annihilation we got Tpk’d at the end of the game. It was pretty satisfying honestly

Another banger!

I think for the purpose of the conversation, we need to make one very important distinction. Wanting to avoid a TPK is not the same as not wanting to have a TPK, because in order to avoid something, it *needs* to be a possibility. The only solution to not wanting to have it, is to simply not make it a possibility. And I think there are players who want the former, and players who want the latter. The first thing I wanted to address is something I see in many videos about either TPK or just PC death in general, and that is consequences. Yes, a character or party death is a consequence. But what annoys me (to the point of frustration because of how often it's repeated), is that it's always presented as if without death, there could be no other consequences. And that without consequences, success has no value. Firstly, we are supposed to be creative people, surely we can come up with other consequences. Secondly, if success is difficult to obtain, you don't need consequences for it to feel rewarding. The most simple example I can give here is trick shots. Just throwing an object and making it follow or end up in a very difficult path/location. There are no stakes here. Nobody dies if you fail. And if it's just a one-off throw, it doesn't even require time to practice. But pulling it off can still feel incredibly satisfying. The success itself has value, and not obtaining the success is already a sort of punishment for failure. The second point I wanted to address is the reason why Matt and Brennan didn't really follow through with the TPK. I do agree, cynical as that may be, with the theory that part of why they did it was their financial investment. But I think it's also a bit short sighted. Because time = money. While people at home may not spend thousands on production values, recording equipment, set design etc, they do spend a lot of time on making their character and designing their world. They often spend a lot of time on planning and may have to make family compromises in order to play. To them, it may not be a business decision, but it is still a question of whether your investment was worth the outcome. Just the fact that you spend an hour or more on an encounter, and you lost, that is already a big loss in terms of entertainment. In video games, losing 4 hours of progress could be the trigger for plenty of people rage-quit and never touch the game again. People value their time, and saying there's no consequence for losing an encounter if the consequence isn't "death" implies that you don't value their time (or maybe you just haven't though of it that way). The last point I wanted to address is the emotional philosophical part at the end. While you brought in in a touching way, I don't agree at all with the idea, that something needs to be able to end abruptly because that's what happens in real life. A lot of people play games to get *away* from real life. Me for example, I don't want it to end abruptly because there's a lot of fun things I still want to do. And I hope that when my time finally comes, I can say "I have done enough, it's fine now". What a lot of people fear, is dying when there are still things they want to do. It's kind of like a fear of missing out. It's part of the reason why some people make the same character over and over again. It's an indication that they never actually got to do the thing that they made that character for, and they want to keep trying. And ending is not what makes something beautiful, the beauty of something is what makes it beautiful, the ending, along with the beginning, only gives it a frame of reference, making it easier to create memories of.

As a DM, there are so many worse things you can do to players than kill them. This is just often a failing of the systems to leave you with an option of only "or Death."

I do believe a TFS Dragonball Z Abridged watching is in Order, Enlighten her mind with that awesomeness xD

I'm also going to make the argument that you are not fully correct about. Never after. I do not think a TPK was planned. I do think a TPK was planned for. And The constant cycle of a story being retold. Seem to have always been in theme.

You really think the Neverafter TPK wasn't intentional? As I understood it that was planed to show the players how the world worked.

Does this count as a TPK? I think it does: We had a campaign of just 2 players + DM. I was a punk kid rogue, and the other player was sageish cleric dude. We had an NPC with us in the last dungeon, a goblin (cleric as well). We navigated the dungeon, found the final boss and the boss just... Disintegrated my fellow player. We were miles underground, no way to bring back my fellow PC. We decided to "fade to black" on me leaping on the boss, teary-eyed, daggers in hand, to take my last spiteful stabs at the beast (which we didn't even roll for). It was sombre, especially since we had just completed an arc that was very personal to my fellow PC cleric. It felt a bit pointless, because this dungeon was a side quest from our main story. ... But we still talk about it, years later. A lot. ... Stories need an ending.

NOTE: AT THIS POINT ONLY STARTED VID I had an idea for a way to introduce a bbeg, when the party is level 2, running around in the bbeg's base, then the bbeg just swiftly anhilates the party. then ressurects them with them behind bars without equipment, saying "While annoying, I must keep you alive for further plans. Be good 'heros' and maybe after all of this I will only wipe your entire memory." Which builds both a "Oh hey we can mess around too far" and a "Be careful, the bbeg means buisness" and a "What is the bbeg after?" situation. NOTE: AT THIS POINT HAVING WATCHED THE WHOLE VID Tradgegy is nice and just "What could we have done to do things better" is always a question i like to ask myself

Originally D&D was about the emergent 'story'; the tale that emerged from the play, how the characters involved changed and grew and how their actions impacted a campiagn setting. 'Story' has become far too important to the modern incarnation of the game for my taste.

Life always ends too quickly or not quickly enough

"But, a thing isn't beautiful because it lasts."

True facts: I would totally watch a thirty minute discussion of life and relationships.

You're not wrong about life ending suddenly. My friend brought her dad to join my campaign game as I was needing players. However, he suddenly developed heart problems and he's no longer with us. I had to choose what would happen to his character. I could just let my friend play both her and her father's character forever or just try to kill that character off in combat or I could have his character leave. Since we were at a good intermission period I decided that his character felt like he wasn't strong enough and had him leave the group explaining his reasonings with a note.

played a Lawful Evil Tiefling hexblade blood hunter from a once powerful noble line he was raised with two things your words your bond and noblesse oblige so we meet a corrupt noble who killed a local hero from paranoia of him leading a revolt we found the ghost of his direwolf companion who told us the whole story the table thought i was nuts we are lv 4 and there's 8 knights in there with him thankfully it worked out but I fully planned to if my charisma rolls failed just rush the guy and get him before the guards can get me the fact it showed the table i wasnt just a edgy Tiefling warlock was also nice

I'm still mad my first dnd campaign the gm introduced the deck of many things and I tricked my in game brother into drawing from it an evil version of him and a dragon showed up and the dm just said my brother is dead and the game is over all the characters went into hiding or join the bad guys. No redemption for my character or fight with a dragon with the chance of a tpk it was just over and I'm still disappointed with that game. I think the dm was just over this story, wanting to move on but now I don't know if I can get invested into a character again because in the end it might not even matter.

You should do a top 25 comments of 2023, would love to see it!

Good Soup

OKI need to say something. Do not plan TPK's. I'm not entirely sure what you meant by that. But a TPK is a game over screen. And generally a very unsatisfying end to a story. More importantly, if you're planning a t p k basically says to me you are planning on an and counter that is impossible to win. There maybe some extremely obscure s*** you could be doing. And you have to ask yourself if it's actually worth it. Because otherwise you're taking away your players agency. By putting them in a situation where nothing they do in combat matters because they cannot win.

They know matt is not going to killed them

Death should be on the table, I just don't believe that Gandalf should be killed by a random mugger in character 3.

While not a TPK a Critical Role one shot Generation Nord showed how unsatisfying trying not to accept a failure could be. There was no thought of how to move on from there. They just kept bashing against the end game failure repeatedly until it was accepted.

like, comment, subscribe!

Should I TPK or should I get a cup of coffee? Btw you put the spoiler warning AFTER the "well this is a TPK" scene from Candela. I'm sorry. Edit: This is a joke just in case some of you gets angry about it.

3:02 the card is missing

Follow it

You know that never after was PLANNED for character death….

I hope after theses vidios with a bit of a upsetting end, your wife gives you a big hug. I know I want to!

I have a plan if my players die. Planescape

Shout out to DBZ Abridged.

Meanwhile Roll4it are the masters of the TPK... Edit: Atleast they were in the past as they did it alot for better or for worse.

Hi Jay. I loved the first half of NeverAfter. But the end just felt so dull. Only the cast themselves got me through it.

Bottom line: it's difficult to get players to the table for your scenario - give them a TPK, esp early in the campaign, and you will likely never see them at that table again. It will leave a bad taste in their mouths about RPGs in general, and they likely won't take part in any more of yours. We can call them fragile or sensitive - WHATEVER. It was YOUR CAMPAIGN and the gave you THEIR TIME and you ruined that experience with your righteous gameplay BS. These are FRIENDS. Make the game FUN. TPKs are NOT fun. You can literally do ANYTHING you want in your make believe world. Make better choices.

There's so many game systems where you can have a high drama story without death as a random mechanic. It makes so little sense to me why folks choose or create a game system with death as a possibility as the one to stream for long term, when you could just... not do that. Or, and especially for production streams; no plans for what to do if a TPK happens.

As some one who GMd a streamed TPK... I opted for the captured route with a roll off for who was truly unfortunately dead. (Ironically the PC that effectively died, died earlier and was rezed via a "battle royal"one-shot i was not involved or consulted on [who also wasn't able to be rezed because a player pushed the narrative when the cleric player wasn't able to make the previous session and couldn't to purchase diamonds to rez]) That said, let your players fail. Let your players die. As an older edition player... one of the reasons players are death adverse is the "time spent making them", but with character creation tools being so ubiquitous, are you married to the character or the idea/playstyle of that character?

Am I horrible that I kind of want it to happen every now and then? 😂

Eh, sounds like a skill issue